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Top right, on my 10.4 desktop. Crap - you can edit any settings on a Linux desktop. Nothing is cast in stone - not even the kernel! (Of course, I think NTKRNL should have been cast into the sea, along with Bill Gates, but that is a bit irrelevant.)

No, They realized in the rush to be more Mac like, they got the button wrong, so now sometimes it closes the applicaions and sometimes it just closes the window and leaves the application running windowless in the task bar. is now in a context sensitive menu on a monitor that may or may not be the monitor running your application.

But I suppose you could click at the beginning of the above, hold and drag your mouse to the end, right click the block of selected text, select "copy," click Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal, right click next to the flashing prompt, select "paste"... hmmmm... okay, anyone know how to get t

I don't think your analogy is appropriate. Arguably, they should give users preferences, which is different from a car. Car is hardware, the pedal is at one place, the brake at another. If these don't suit you, because you learned to drive with different combination of pedal placements, you are right - it's a disaster of proportions. However, a user account is personal, and placement of buttons is not a problem since these are personal preference - some people DO prefer buttons in different places than what

Thinking that editing a gconf value or changing a desktop theme is as simple as turning a paper upside down to the average Joe PC user.

but we're talking Gnome, on Ubuntu, which is a flavor of Linux. None of these terms encapsulate "average Joe PC user". The expectations are a bit higher.

Outside of this, it is far easier to switch your buttons/theme on Gnome (or KDE, or XFCE, or whatever windows manager you like) then it is to switch them in Windows or OS X. In neither of these can you really muck with the GUI outside of using 3rd party tools.

If you use Ubuntu daily, and you complain about where the buttons are, then I have very little sympathy for you. Ubuntu is far more customizable than any of the mainstream OSs. You actually have a choice on where you want your buttons.

If you don't like it, and are too lazy to spend 10 second on Googling the simple solution, then download a different distro that puts the buttons where you want them on install.

Defaults are important if you are going to roll something out to thousands of desktops.

It has to be decent or half decent at least, so you don't get so many calls.It has to be consistent too, so that you don't so many calls and so that when you get the calls you don't waste extra time trying to figure out where the fuck is the close button is.

That's why many large corporations aren't rolling out Windows 7 over night, and they even upgrade Windows 7 machines to XP when they buy them. Windows 7 changed many things for little gain (Vista doesn't even exist as far as many corps are concerned;) ). The rest are doing it by attrition (only as new machines come in).

So the fact that "Desktop Linux" can't even get simple stuff like this right isn't going to help acceptance at all. Think long and hard about where you want to put your menus, close buttons, cancel and OK, and then STICK TO IT. Stop fucking around with it.

Unless of course you have a powerful reality distortion field like Steve Jobs.

p.s. Those stupid wobbly windows and zillions of themes aren't worth anything when it comes to productivity. Making it easy for users to change themes just makes it hard for Support to help them over the phone if they pick something really different.

I'm not sure why you reference Microsoft in this discussion. The reason I think the buttons are supposed to go top right is because GEOS on the Commodore 64 has them (well, 'it') there.

Not everything in this universe is stolen and subsequently claimed to be invented by Microsoft, you know.

No, some things are also stolen, then "invented" by Apple too.

Seriously, when 10.04 came out with the buttons in the upper left, I thought it was misguided too. But for kicks, I decided to leave them that way to see if it was actually usable for me. Guess what? After a day or two, I liked it. I haven't changed them.

You know, I really think it just comes down to spatial memory. After having used 10.04 with the buttons in the upper left, whenever I go and use a windows machine, my eyes automatically go there looking for the buttons.

I can understand the frustration with a user interface change, even a trivial one that's easy to change back. But it bugs me that most reviews I read of new Ubuntu releases focus exclusively on trivial user interface changes, and ignore changes to the internals.

Man Ubuntu's cycle runs fast if they are already releasing another version. Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?.

Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?

Microsoft isn't on any cycle. They are lost in the woods.

If you're like me and don't like the risk of upgrading all the time, pick a LTS ("Long Term Support") release, and stick with it for the next 3 years. Lucky for you, it sounds like you installed 10.04 which is an LTS release.

The problem with Ubuntu's LTS releases is, well, sometimes they throw in stuff that's barely ready for a "normal" release, let alone long-term. 8.04 saw the first cut at PulseAudio, for example, which wasn't even close to ready for prime-time.

As a result, things that are broken often stay broken. Sure, you can get unsupported backports or PPAs, but you shouldn't have to in a stability-first endeavour like the LTS releases.

My experience has been positive with both Dapper Drake and Hardy Heron. I still have Karmic installed on my notebook because I don't like either the new color schemes or the buttons-on-the-left. I'm annoyed at the high-handed way that Canonical treats long-time users, so I've refrained from upgrading to Lucid Lynx on the desktop until, kicking and whining, I have to next March if I'm sticking with Ubuntu. Hardy has been stable, quick and thanks to Ubuntuzilla, I've got the newest Firefox. I'm also using ALS

Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?

Well, it fits into the "Release early. Release Often." philosophy that made linux what it is today. Apart from that, one advantage is that all of the hard core folk can install it and give it a good thrashing over. All of the major hardware work-arounds will have been sorted out, major weaknesses will be eliminated, etc. A year from now, you'll have a good yea-or-nay fe

Applications and their dependencies are offered in the repositories as a coherent set.

Canonical's emphasis has been on producing a Linux distribution that appeals to desktop users. Many of the applications that desktop users most use -- Web browsers, most especially -- have significant updates frequently.

So, you can stick with the long term support (LTS) version of the distribution, if you prefer to avoid the frequent upgrades and are satisfied with older versions of the more volatile applications. If you w

Try installing one of the linux distros - they shouldn't be too hard to find. There's even one mentioned in the article summary (oops, my bad, I keep forgetting how many slashdotters don't RTFS, never mind RTFA).

You could say the same thing about "Protestants and Catholics", "Muslims and Christians" or even "Theists and Atheists". For exactly the same reasons.

That is a really bad example. My family are all Catholic (so am I technically, but I think denominations do not matter), my wife is protestant, as are many of my friends. Some of my closest friends are atheists, and since I moved to a town that has a large Muslim population (about a quarter of the total) I have been making Muslim friends.

We all manage to get along with a minimum of glares and nasty comments, and those are rarely about religion.

Ubuntu 10.04 has got to be the most fragile Linux I've used in ten years. Are there any filesystems that can't be mounted? Then NO BOOT FOR YOU!

I'll admit I like how fast it boots when ureadahead works, but I'm willing to wait an extra minute for the boot to finish, if that means I actually do get to boot instead of having to boot from a rescue CD and comment-out or "noauto" the problem filesystem in fstab.

Yes - give the removable disk's partition a name - if it's ext3, use something like "e2fslabel/dev/sdg1 DRIVENAME" where the DRIVENAME is the name you want to use. Then you should find that GNOME will auto-mount your drive under/media/DRIVENAME, and it will appear in the Nautilus file explorer as well.

For NTFS drives, use ntfslabel with same syntax, and for FAT32, use "mlabel drive:label" - you will of course need to replace the 'g' in sdg1 above with whatever your drive uses (dmesg | tail -22 just after connecting your drive should tell you).

One of the problems I have with this is the fact that as of Version 2.10 of the Intel driver, kernel Mode setting is mandatory. When I upgraded from Jaunty to Lucid, thats when first Kernel Mode Setting became available, and you had to disable it in/etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf

But the only reason I was able to do that is because version 2.9 still retains the older User Mode Setting method that avoids the flicker. As of 2.10, Intel's drivers require Kernel mode setting. I use S-video to connect my Laptop to

Exactly. I get so tired of the "waaaah, my grandma cant do $X without help on it" complaints. Our elders are always asking for help with their computers no matter what software is on it. If they need help, either help them, or tell them to buy a support contract (or buy one for them if you're nice and can afford it).

Eventually they'll die and wont need tech support anymore.

Soon after that technology will start confusing the shit out of you and you'll be asking your kids for help.

I know perfectly well what my grandma is using her PC for, I will set up everything for her anyway.If there's a problem, I am still the one who is being asked about it, so I better use a system which doesn't break that easy.

So yeah, my grandmas* don't know what ssh with reverse forwarding is, but they have it set up so I can log on to them any time from anywhere (their PCs connect to my shell server). Important is, they can't break anything, they don't have root password. If there's an issue I can fix it in

Yes it is in order to meet their stupid release deadlines. As an example copying CDs to a file was broken in the default install of Lucid. Not sure if it's been fixed yet for maverick or even lucid, haven't had time to check.

I have been using Ubuntu since 6.04, and really like it. However usually when I try to upgrade from 1 version to the next it crashes and I end up just installing the new version from scratch. Hope it is different this time.

I've also been on Ubuntu since 2006 with the 6.06 release, which was their first LTS.. I only upgrade when the following LTS comes out, so I was on 8.04 until very recently. Just went out and bought a new 160GB system drive (and a new 1TB drive data drive to replace the old 500GB) for the main desktop and a 500GB for the laptop and did clean installs of 10.04 on both systems. I *tried* to upgrade 6.06 to 8.04... was not pretty... Now I do clean installs.

Ubuntu installs so fast, I tend to try the upgrade process first, figuring 'what the hell, may as well try it.' In my case, 10.04 was the very first time an upgrade actually worked. I was pleasantly surprised.

The summary mentions that Evolution will be faster. Can any beta-testers report on whether it is much of an improvement?

I'd been increasingly unhappy with Evolution. It's very, very slow; it usually fails to display HTML email, which is increasingly common, and it often freezes for thirty seconds or so when I try to do it. I use Gmail and Google Calendar, but prefer to use a local client; Evolution offers integration with Google services, but that integration is clumsy. For instance, to "archive" email in my inbox, I have to click the "delete" button.

So, I finally got around to installing Thunderbird. In order to get the functionality I wanted, that I'd had in Evolution, I had to install several addons: Enigmail, Lightning, and Provider for Google Calendar. Importing contacts was a bit messy, and I haven't worked out yet how to sync Thunderbird's address book with Google Contacts. There's less thorough integration of Thunderbird into the GNOME interface.

Yet despite those difficulties, Thunderbird is much, much better at the core functions for which I'd been using Evolution: email and calendaring. It is faster, displays messages more cleanly, and integrates better with Google services.

I've been seeing complaints from Ubuntu users for years that they'd rather have Thunderbird as the default client, and that it works better than Evolution, save for the less thorough integration into GNOME. Having made the switch, I'm really at a loss why Ubuntu and GNOME are sticking with Evolution, and not at least treating Thunderbird as a peer.

Seriously, I *always* have to tweak modelines and shit, and yes I'm sure it's the television I have, but in Windows it at least looks "OK" out of the box.

P.S. Also, you are the exact Linux user that makes the community fucked. "It works for me, maybe you're a moron and your hardware sucks" is not a very good response. I thought Linux was supposed to be able to run on *anything* right?

Linux is supposed to be able to run on a fairly wide range of supported hardware, not everything.

I do not buy hardware unless I think confident that it will work with Linux (no exhaustive research, just quick checking) and almost everything has been fully functional out of the box, and I have exactly one serious problem (laptop sound needed a config file edited to work, and it took a lot of Googling to find the fix - when I reinstalled to swtich distro six months later it worked out of the box.).

Between my TV (sharp aquos LC-UN series) and whatever computer if I plug into its VGA I have to force resolution whether we are talking about windows or Linux but if I plug into it via HDMI then I get proper resolution support.

the problem between windows and linux is often an EDID version issue, either the Windows driver is smart enough to combine the 1.x and 2.x EDIDs or the Linux driver is not smart enough to use the 2.x EDID, those are the typical problems. but this really boils down to the TV manufactur

Why is this always the ultimate answer to all Linux hardware problems from the zealot crowd? "Oh, your hardware is crap. Go buy good one!". With "good" implicitly defined as "works in Linux". Well, my hardware doesn't work in Linux, but works just fine in quite a few other OSes. Why do neither Windows nor FreeBSD have any problem whatsoever with my wireless card, but Linux (any distro... went through 5 in the last 6 months) can only list networks and not connect since new (read: broken) Ralink drivers were

Those are my biggest "sigh, Windows does it better" issues too. Windows did duel monitors right almost 10 years ago, so it always shocks me when it just never works right in Ubuntu. Little things like audio shouldn't be a problem either, but they are for me, especially on my laptop.

These are the kinds of things that need fixing first if Ubuntu (and Linux) ever wants to be taken seriously.

OTOH, Dual monitor support is neither here nor there. There's probably loads of much more relevant stuff to focus on.

As much as certain people like to whine about this, it's obscure and geeky. Most people don't even know it's possible.

Even clerks are getting dual screen setups nowadays. They are certainly not obscure or geeky anymore.

Regarding your sig: Nope. The SI is meant to be practical for physics and everyday usage for measuring properties of the physical world. Use KiB from the apropriate IEC standard already and stop confusing others.

This is my gripe about Ubuntu and much open source or "free" software. Ok, first, yes, it's free, so I have no right to complain. Second here's my complaint: they keep putting in effort in places that really don't seem important while neglecting those that do matter. A possibly non-Ubuntu specific example from this month. I upgraded to 10.04 which brought in a newer Thunderbird. This Thunderbird places its user directory in a different directory than the version I was using then makes a symlink to there fro

Well the first part of your reply is rather obvious - I assumed most readers would understand that was all implied.
As for:

So, what are you doing in order to align THEIR insterests to YOURS? Are you throwing money at it or something?
Because surely you don't expect they will neglect THEIR INTERESTS in order to support YOUR INTERESTS just out of thin air, do you?

I have no idea what their interests are so I have no idea what I might do to align their interests with mine. I might guess that part of their in

Is that with Lucid? Not trying to pull a "I don't have this problem, so it must be you" thing here, but on my laptop with Lucid I've connected many an external monitor by just plugging it in and using the Monitors utility in the Preferences menu. Once or twice I've gotten a weird result, like weird resolution or the monitors getting switched, but that's pretty rare. Usually it works pretty well. My laptop's using an Intel graphics chipset, and that may have something to do with it, I'm not sure. I used

I dunno, unstable is pretty good most of the time. Yes, because it's "unstable", it gets things like major Xorg updates, etc, which can break things for a while, but if you're willing to scan the changelogs before doing a distro update (yes, you actually have to do a bit of diligence), its actually pretty solid.

Right sir, I get right on it. I will make the packages BOTH cutting edge AND give them proven stabilty. While I am at it, how about I make you nice curry sir, both spicy yet bland. A nice coffee, both stimulating and caffeine free.

Right sir, I get right on it. I will make the packages BOTH cutting edge AND give them proven stabilty. While I am at it, how about I make you nice curry sir, both spicy yet bland.

I think grandparent is asking for a free pony too, but it's not quite as absurd as it sounds. Ubuntu takes a snapshot every six months and some packages are always in a half-broken state as they're rewriting things. If you think of product quality a of a graph it goes like/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\ where the tops are releases and bottoms the bleeding edge releases in between. Sometimes it really is such that you could go backwards or forwards and both would be better than whatever point Ubuntu froze at. The number of

Much of the "wizbang" Ubuntu releases are from upstream versions of gnome. I guess they could use the most stable packages, but then how would they fulfill your wish to be more up to date? There is a server version -- you install it from the alternate cd. Usually, it is only the desktop environment and applications that get the new features. Things like apache, etc. seem to be pretty stable on ubuntu. For the utmost in control, you could just install the command-line version, then download and compile